I had a science prof who said that “In science, it’s not what we know but how we know it”. When I read science articles, there is often a discussion of the experiments or the observations that led to the “conclusions” in the title. The people doing the work really have “seen” things.
Yeah, there’s a lot of faith in the fact that I haven’t read the give-and-take in the literature where people argue out other possible explanations. And, I have faith that published stuff really reflects observations (we have cases where that isn’t true). I guess any inductive reasoning amounts to faith to the extent that we haven’t seen every possible case. I’ve seen some of the fringes of science, and it seems that people are reporting things they have “seen”, so I make the inductive leap that they usually have something “solid” for their statements.
I probably shouldn’t have used faith, since it’s vague and has obvious undertones.
I guess I want to say that I think most people aren’t that into the scientific method, or understand how peer review works, have never read a research article, don’t know a null-hypothesis from a double-blind, and don’t know any scientists personally. They also don’t share our values of objectivity or associate it with science.
Their understanding of science is some vague memories of grade-school facts, and someone on the news reporting “scientists discover _____!”
For most people, trust in science is rooted in the power of science. It is responsible for countless technological miracles. It is as though we have priests who do actual magic. It doesn’t make any sense to say they are wrong.
However, we can also get our news programs to say “those aren’t real scientists doing real science because reasons”. And then if we want, then we can believe those contrary news programs.
Then we have a feeling that we have an opinion of our own (which is contrary to our community). But we don’t.
So, for the average person, it’s either blind trust in Fauci, or blind trust against Fauci.
Certainly if you’re an actuary with an analytical mind and a ton of education, you can read all the articles yourself, and basically reach a level of qualification close to Fauci. I think Lucy has done just that.
So Lucy can trust in herself instead of Fauci. And we could trust in Lucy. Or read all the literature ourselves. But we are rare exceptions in that.
Imma trust Lucy. I have tried reading medical studies and they all just seem to say “blah blah 93% blah blah a study of 350 people blah blah”. And I can’t seem to get past extrapolating 350 people to the entire population. And it’s a lot of blah blah blah. Makes me think I should have gone to medical school, but then I wouldn’t understand insurance.
I agree that most people are like that, and I am sometimes. I just wanted to say that it is possible to put “faith” in scientists that isn’t entirely blind.
The flip side of that is that you always have to rely on others to some degree.
Even working scientists won’t understand everything about what they are studying. There may be aspects of the theory they are testing, or the experimental equipment, or whatever, that they do not completely understand and have to trust others about.